Euro Previews: ‘The Bluecoats’ Comedic Civil War Tales Goes Darker With The Domestic Struggles Of ‘The Draft Riots’

Every month, the publisher Cinebook publishes English language versions of some incredible Euro albums, showing us, time and again, that the Euro comics market is so far ahead of Brit and American comics. Case in point, the brilliant and unexpected screwball comedy of The Bluecoats takes a darker turn in The Draft Riots.

Okay, so it’s not exactly a preview when it’s books that are already out, but these Cinebook English language volumes of some of the finest Euro albums are really worth your time, so it’s almost my duty, in as much as I have a love of getting fabulous Euro comics that you might otherwise miss in front of your eyes, to show you what you should be asking your local comic shop to get these excellent volumes in for you.

The Bluecoats takes the US Civil War, Unionists vs Confederates, and turns it into, quite brilliantly, a comedic caper tale, focusing in on the misadventures of Corporal Blutch, your classic slacker soldier, always searching for the easy out, his only wish to get out of the army, lazy, just one step away from desertion, always looking for a way to get out of any actual work; and Sergeant Cornelius Chesterfield, Blutch’s polar opposite, the dedicated soldier, proud and true, patriotic and determined that the war is a noble thing, and constant in his determination that Blutch should be a proper soldier.

The Bluecoats is one of those massive Euro comics successes, with sales of over 15 million copies across 62 volumes since 1972. It’s a wonderful sit-com comics that Euro comics manage to do so effortlessly, the same set of recurring characters dropped into ever so slightly different situations every album and always delivering some wonderful comedy beats in every album.

In this latest volume, we have the grind of the Civil War, relentless, seemingly never-ending to those involved, where the losses on the Union side are mounting, meaning that volunteers are getting very thin on the ground. So, the obvious solution to those in charge, the higher-ups with no idea of what it’s truly like on the ground, is to impose conscription, the draft.

As you can imagine, this isn’t exactly the most popular of things, where inequality rears its ugly head, the rich able to buy their way out of things. But the Yankee North doesn’t really have a choice, it’s the only thing they can do to keep fighting the good fight.

Which leaves us with where we are in The Draft Riots, July 1863 in New York City, Sgt Chesterfield and Corporal Blutch caught up in the simmering resentment of a world caught up in the draft. It’s perhaps the darkest and most socially relevant volume of The Bluecoats to date, doing that thing that all war comedies do at some point, dropping the comedy for a time, although there are still moments of great character comedy in here, and replacing it with a quite harrowing tale of social inequalities in the horrors of the war.

Cauvin subverts the usual sit-com elements of The Bluecoats that we’ve come to expect to give us far more relevant and socially conscious moments, the way that the rich simply buy themselves out of conscription, inequalities laid bare and the unfairness of our world, no matter what era we’re talking about, laid out there before our eyes. Sure, The Bluecoats may be a sit-com, but it has all the power of a socially relevant sit-com, much the same as something like M.A.S.H. opened viewer’s eyes to the horrors of war whilst still making us laugh.

In The Draft Riots we have a classic comedy, full of all the comedic moments The Bluecoats usually delivers, that also takes time to deal with racism, social inequality, and the real horrors of war. To do all that and yet still give us incredible moments of comedy is just a sublime bit of comic storytelling.

So, in a New York where everyone is against them, we have Blutch and Chestefield on the run from an anti-draft mob, needing to disguise themselves to escape mob rule that’s taking over the city, a far more serious and dangerous world than they normally face, and let’s not forget they’re usually facing the guns and bullets of the front line. Yet there’s still plenty of time to add comedic moments to the seriousness, a little light amongst a very dark and perilous volume of The Bluecoats…

What The Draft Riots ends up delivering is something familiar yet also unexpected. We have all the comedic moments Cauvin and Lambil usually deliver yet we also have those dark, dark moments of social commentary, quite unexpected for those of us who have followed The Bluecoats all this time. And it turns this volume into something quite extraordinarily marvellous.

The Bluecoats Volume 17: The Draft Riots – script by Raoul Cauvin, art by Willy Lambil, colours by Leonardo, translation by Jerome Saincantin

Published by Cinebook on 18 January 2024

Now, a quick preview of the first few pages of a quite brilliant volume of The Bluecoats…